queer

I’m very excited to see Disney’s new Live-Action Beauty and the Beast, and not just because it was my favorite animated Disney movie growing up. Allow me to explain:

***

The girl who takes my fast-food order has conspicuous miniature band-aids over her dimples, raised away from the skin by the dermal jewelry they cover. Her nose has a hole with no stud. Her cuticles are stained black where the nail-polish remover didn’t penetrate. She smiles brightly, her extended hand holding my change, each finger sporting a ring.

The retail worker who helps answer my questions about pre-order bonuses for Mass Effect Andromeda has long-sleeves on. When he reaches for a top shelf, his right sleeve pulls back. His arm is covered in vivid scales, the sweep of a Koi-fish revealed for just a moment before he tugs the sleeve of his shirt back into place. I’ve seen work like that before, hundreds of dollars and hours spent under the needle. The lanyard that holds his name badge has a pin with koi-fish in swirling water.

My friend meets me for coffee. She’s changed her hair since the last time I saw her. The hot pink streaks in her blonde hair have been covered over with a chocolate brown that matches her roots but make her look pale and tired. The medical monopoly that runs all the hospitals in the area insists that their nurses have “natural” hair colors. Her fingernails where she holds her Cappuccino are bright pink.

***

Particular ways of seeing, or rather, not seeing, manifest themselves with vehemence in Toledo, Ohio. All of these moments, instances that wouldn’t have fazed me before I lived in Syracuse, now strike with precise and disquieting force as I visit my hometown during spring break week. A few hours away, in New York, these bodies are allowed to exist in the public spaces. The waitstaff and retail workers sport tattoos and piercings and bright hair colors. They paint their faces with startling hues and ornament their unique bodies. Non-normative people exist, and insist on their existence in public spaces. I’ve only been gone from Toledo since August, but it was a shock to the system to return.

It is a particular brand of cognitive dissonance that maintains the normative through the repression of non-normative bodies. It maintains equilibrium by enforcing blindspots through the control of Capitalist structures. These young people working in food services and retail, these thirty-somethings serving in the medical field, all need these jobs in order to survive. Yet, these jobs act as a powerful normalizing force against them. Keep your piercings out or you can’t take burger orders. Cover your tattoos or you can’t answers questions about video games. Dye your vibrant hair a “natural” color or you can’t possibly administer life-saving medication and care. Remain “professional.”

The Midwestern “normal” functions through the creation and maintenance of purposeful blindspots that deny the existence of alternative forms of expression. “Blindspots” only remain viable so long as non-normative bodies are forced into invisibility and silence. This silence does not actually remove their existence, but instead denies them space within the discourse of normality. If piercings must be removed, tattoos covered, and hair dyed, then alternative modes of self-expression will continue to be absent from professional settings. These alternative bodies must find voice on the fringes or not be voiced at all, relegated to the silences within discourse that Michel Foucault describes in his History of Sexuality.

***

My reflections on queer existence in our present political moment from my post last week (which you can read here: https://metathesisblog.com/2017/03/10/facebook-and-uncanny-identity/) no doubt primed me for noticing these “blindspots” during my trip home (in fact, the use of body modification by the queer community for self-expression makes this censorship of non-normative bodies all the more relevant for me, see Victoria Pitts’ article “Visibly Queer: Body Technologies and Sexual Policies” in The Sociological Quarterly). It was actually discouraging to see the ways that these non-normative forms of self-expression were being systematically crushed by structures within Capitalism. I recognize that this happens in the back of my mind constantly, but seeing it physically manifested in front of me was difficult.

Cue Disney’s new release of Beauty and the Beast. The Internet has been all atwitter since the announcement a few weeks ago that the character of LeFou, Gaston’s sidekick, will be portrayed as openly gay. First came the initial excitement over representation of an LGBTQIA+ character by a major motion picture. Then came fear about what that representation might look like (yet another queer villain, a gay man who is uncomfortable with his own sexuality, etc.). Regardless of the problems that may arise surrounding this character, it is the first openly gay character that Disney has put in one of their films, a historic moment of representation.

Not long after this announcement, demands for censorship started to roll in, the carefully crafted mode of cognitive dissonance deeply disturbed by representations of a gay man in a film about a love story between a beast-animal creature and a young woman. It is impossible for queer and non-normative bodies to remain invisible and non-existent in the minds of the majority if their entertainment represents these lives. In order to maintain this normative silence, LeFou had to go.

For a moment, my heart sank. After all, this is the same company that changed a male Tibetan character into a white Celtic woman in order to maintain profits for Doctor Strange abroad. The power of Capitalism over the film industry functions powerfully to reinforce hegemonic ideals of the normal within their representations. I thoroughly expected to start reading reports of censorship by Disney of LeFou and the films touted “gay scene” in order to maintain their profits. That was why it was such a joy to see this article (http://www.nbc26.com/news/national/disney-delays-release-of-beauty-and-the-beast-in-malaysia-after-gay-moment-cut-from-film) from NBC, stating that Disney will not remove the scene from the film even if it costs them profits. In fact, the company has chosen to pull the film from Malaysian theatres rather than remove LeFou or his scenes.

By no means is this an ultimate victory or a complete solution. Often, these systems are so powerful and deeply entrenched that it doesn’t seem that there will ever be hope for representation for non-normative bodies and identities in our mainstream culture. Yet, this film is a moment of encouragement, a bright spot, further proof that systems can be changed over time. The service industry workers in New York can have further autonomy over their modes of identity constructions. They can have bright green hair, and septum piercings, and chest tattoos, and LeFou can be hot for Gaston.

Hillarie ‘Rhyse’ Curtis is a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University where she studies (and occasionally writes about) queer narratives, masculinity, trauma, war, and fan fiction, among other things.

Last week, I completed the Safer People, Safer Spaces training my university offers to learn better ways to be an ally, whether you’re a member or a supporter of the queer community. One of the activities we did involved matching vocabulary words (like lesbian, heteronormativity, drag, M2F) to their definitions and then discussing what we learned and what confused us. One of the words was asexuality, and to my surprise, no one had any questions about it!

In most settings, this is definitely not the norm. Even though, as one blogger pointed out, the US is home to more asexuals (or, as some prefer to be called, aces) than it is to Muslims, breast-cancer survivors, and Yale graduates, asexuality is not on most people’s radars. Even those within the LGBT community are sometimes unaware of asexuality as an orientation — indeed, the “A” in LGBTQIA+ more often stands for “ally” than “ace.” Thus, Asexual Awareness Week (this year, October 26–November 1) occurs at the end of LGBT History Month. Today, I’m going to sketch out the ways the conversations I see happening inside the asexual community might shape the queer theory of the future.

Only a handful of scholars in the humanities are doing research on asexuality studies.1 Nevertheless, the language of asexuality as it exists in the everyday praxis of aces has been invaluable to helping me reconsider the ways we think about desire and relationships in texts. Because asexuality — that is, the absence of sexual attraction — does not preclude the formation of other attractions, aces have developed a vocabulary set to describe those experiences. They distinguish between sexual, romantic, affective (“friendly”), and aesthetic attraction, and the different conditions under which these occur and the objects that these take. For instance, “homoromantic” describes someone who falls in love with those of their same sex or gender; a “demiromantic” is someone who falls in love only after a long friendship; an “aromantic” doesn’t fall in love, but might desire intense friendship.2

These desires are not new, and certainly aren’t limited to aces: John Henry Newman’s romantic friendships look very much like the intimate relationships of a homoromantic ace, but the chaste “seraphick love” that John Evelyn and Mary Godolphin shared in the seventeenth century could be conceived of as a queerplatonic relationship of two otherwise sexual people. What is new is the way these words examine phenomena whose existence and uniformity have been taken for granted.

Sometimes, the impulse to name certain desires can overwhelm the desires themselves, but what I think these concepts highlight is the plurality of ways in which people form attractions and desires, and that their objects need not be so neatly aligned. For instance, considering the ways in which Doyle’s John Watson might be simultaneously heterosexual (marrying and having a child by Mary Morstan) and homoromantic (in romantic love with Sherlock Holmes) helps us to grasp how a person can desire two objects in different, non-competing ways. In a way, asexuality has done for romance and sexuality what Judith Butler has done for gender and sex, by uncoupling one from the other (pun intended).

But the asexual community, of course, is not without its controversies. Some people don’t think that asexuality should be lumped into the LGBTQ+ “alphabet soup” because it’s technically not a sexual orientation but rather a not-sexual orientation. This, I think, ignores the great potential for intersectional solidarity, as homoromantic and trans* aces face oppressions that are very similar to those faced by their allosexual counterparts, and heteronormativity limits the experiences of sexual nonconformists indiscriminately.

Some have also criticized how white the movement is, with writers of color like Alok Vaid-Menon describing how to claim asexuality as an identity feels like a betrayal of their race. Some identity communities have long been de-sexualized as a means of discipline and disenfranchisement. Thus, self-describing as asexual plays into these enduring stereotypes, which certainly need dismantling. The asexuality leadership has been surprisingly self-reflexive about how race and gender authorizes (or fails to authorize) the perceived legitimacy of certain sexual orientations. At the same time, however, it’s no less important for us to question those structures that make sexuality compulsory, while we remain sex-positive.

I think the definition that we had to match at training put it best: “Each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.” Just delete “asexual” and you’ll have described everyone. As queer studies develops, we’re thinking more plurally to account for the many and colorful ways that our experiences and identities intersect, shaping our selfhoods and our positions in our communities.

Notes

NWSA’s Asexuality Studies Interest Group and the conference panels it has coordinated has been my primary source for asexuality studies in the humanities.

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

This summer, I fell for BBC’s “Sherlock” hard1 — hard enough to drive me back to fanfic. Fanfic has grown up in the past decade: it now has activists, “aca-fans” (academic fans), and copyright lawyers, and a nonprofit defending artists’ rights to disseminate transformative works, including fiction. My casual intention to fill the wait till next season with fanfic rapidly developed into academic fascination, especially because I discovered that its writers are challenging traditional notions of sexuality and narrative in ways that mass media and even academia aren’t.

In fact, I’d like to suggest that some of the problems about LGBT historiography I discussed last week could be mitigated by our adopting a transformative fiction philosophy. Allow me to map the landscape of queer fanfic, using Sherlock as an example, before I argue that point.

Sherlock fans have been writing fanfic ever since Arthur Conan Doyle (or ACD, as fanfic writers call him) was still writing. Anne Jamison, an English and fan-culture scholar, has described the output of the Sherlock fandom over the past century as essentially transformative works. This includes not just unpublished fanfic but also myriad films, novels, and TV programs, because they all transform the canonical ACD stories, in form and content, with a fan’s devotion to “writing that continues, interrupts, reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about.”2

The genealogy of fanfic for BBC’s Sherlock is particularly rich for my interest in transformative fiction, because it’s a nesting doll of referentiality. BBC Sherlock fic riffs on Moffat and Gatiss’s twenty-first century reincarnation of Sherlock, which itself riffs on ACD’s Victorian Sherlock and the many twentieth-century reincarnations which the program’s creators have declared canonized.3 Fic writer A.J. Hall, as Jamison points out, can make reference to BBC’s Sherlock, ACD’s Sherlock, and a 1950’s “fan-authored pastiche” Sherlock all in one fic4 — yet no one would mistake that fic for any of its source texts.

This is the difference between “canon” and what fans call “headcanon.” Canon is the Ur-text, a status to which fan writers make no claim of aspiring. There is a certain playful value attached to incorporating elements from canon (Sherlock’s affinity for bees shows up inmanyfics, as well as the TV program), but these nods exist within “headcanon” — a fan’s personal parallel world(s). “Headcanon” exists alongside “canon,” depending upon the source for basic inspiration (usually its characters) but freely recreating the source in a conscious departure from it.

Fans use these parallel worlds to explore what could have been or might be, especially as regards sexualities that have not found mainstream representation. There is no conclusive literary evidence that ACD conceived of his Sherlock and John as “homosexual”; their relationship presents as a romantic friendship, although those were going out of fashion when he was writing. Likewise, despite queerbaiting, Moffat insists that his Sherlock is not gay, let alone ace. In fanfic, however, literally any interpretation goes.

Myriad fanfic categorizing tags allow readers to find what version of Sherlock’s sexuality appeals to them: gay “Johnlock” and asexual!Sherlock/bisexual!John cover some of the more popular ones, in addition to “OT3s” (One True Threesomes) and a plethora of kinks (the usual varieties, along with furries, fauns, and male pregnancy). While these labels can flatten the contours of the actual uniquely queer praxis within individual works (in the same way that LGBT labels can elide sexual and gender complexities), word-of-mouth reviews of the ways in which a writer imagines two characters negotiating an unprecedented relationship reminds me to keep an open mind about my expectations when see a fic’s tags.

Although authors and readers both have pet theories about what Sherlock’s sexuality “really” is, the fan writer’s explicit self-distancing from “canon” means that a plurality of “headcanons” co-exist on the periphery of the source text. My friend can ship gay Johnlock, I can ship bisexual!John/straight!Mary/asexual!Sherlock, and fanfic satisfies both our preferences without (much) argument between us.

In this way, we might think of historical LGBT icons as personal role models without needing or intending to make claims about their “canonical” sexuality. In my parallel narrative, Joan of Arc is patron of trans* rights and John Henry Newman is patron of asexuality. Neither of these is true in historical reality, and I would never write an essay to “prove” it, but that’s my “headcanon,” and (if I may abuse a neologism) — I’m shipping it!

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

John Henry Newman has been in my Twitter feed a lot lately. Apparently, when this Victorian cardinal wasn’t writing his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the nineteenth century’s longest and driest autobiography (sorry, Newman), he wrote religious commentary that some people still find instructive. But it wasn’t all that long ago that Newman was in the news for very different reasons.

Just before his beatification in 2010, gay-rights activists protested the Vatican’s exhumation and relocation of Newman’s remains from the grave he shared with his dear friend, Ambrose St. John, to a chapel for public veneration. Claiming Newman as one of their own, protestors pointed his written command that his body join his friend’s in death: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St. John’s grave and I give this as my last, my imperative will.”1 To the protesters, the Vatican’s flouting ofthis will was a deliberate erasure of what they perceived to be a same-sex relationship from public memory in order to “sanitize” Newman’s biography before sainthood.2

In response, the Vatican commissioned an article that, in reactionary fashion, proceeded to do just that. Ian Ker, a professor and priest, insisted that Newman and St. John’s relationship was purely platonic; that Newman had fought off heterosexual lust as a youth and remained committed to continent celibacy as a priest; and that had Newman been alive today, he would surely have submitted to the wishes of the Church, even if She wanted him reburied away from his dearest friend.3 Ker also would claim that none of Newman’s human remains had been discovered in the exhumation.4 With these four claims, Ker discredited the possibly homosexual nature of Newman’s relationship with St. John at the same time as he called into doubt the enduring existence of the relationship itself.

The public debate over Newman’s identity—saint or sinner, homosexual or celibate5—in 2010 echoes the public debate over Newman’s identity nearly 150 years earlier. In 1864 Newman responded to the criticism of Charles Kingsley, a popular author and adherent of “Muscular Christianity” who publicly accused Newman of displaying perversion in his converting from the Church of England to the Church of Rome—which, since the Reformation, had in England been popularly associated with sodomizing popes and the Whore of Babylon. Curiously, this exchange has today led to scholarly and non-scholarly speculation about Newman’s sexuality.

When I researched Newman for a class on Victorian life-writing, I was struck by how Newman constantly battled public misinterpretation of his life choices and writings during his lifetime. Hence, his publication of that autobiography—an attempt to definitively set the record straight on his supposed perversity. The way in which readers still endeavor today to read between the lines of his writing for evidence of sexual preference seems to me to unravel his endless work to prevent others from commandeering his self-narrative.

This potential for misinterpretation is a problem with declaring historical figures to be “lesbian/gay/bi/trans*.” To call George Washington Carver simply “gay” erases the whole history of slave castration in the American South. To call Joan of Arc simply “trans*” ignores the complexity of early notions of sartorial gender transmutability. Likewise, searching for Newman’s active (homo?)sexuality overwrites not only his stated longtime personal preference for celibacy but also the value of romantic friendship as a relationship that doesn’t have to be hetero–, homo–, or any kind of– sexual.7

To counter this tendency, queer-studies scholar Sharon Marcus advocates a reading process she terms “just reading” as a means of avoiding falling into the trap of “symptomatic reading”—that is, reading our modern versions of sexualities into earlier texts. For her, “‘just reading’ … attends to what texts make manifest on their surface.”8 The symptomatic readings of Newman’s supporters in 2010 looked for “symptoms” of homo– or heterosexuality in Newman’s life. A just reading would take Newman’s text at its word, perhaps with an eye to understanding what it meant for him, as a Catholic priest in nineteenth-century England, to be a celibate man in a romantic friendship. For this reason, “just reading” helps to do justice to the text, its author, and the full spectrum of queer possibilities across the centuries.

Next week: Queering LGBT history

Notes

Ian Ker, “Oxford and Rome Again,” in John Henry Newman: A Biography, new edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 698.

Robert Verkaik, “Plan to Exhume Cardinal is ‘Homophobic’,” Independent (London), August 25, 2008.

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

As I mentioned last week, the original premise of LGBT history month was to spend some time each day in October learning about a new LGBT “icon,” some from current LGBT history and some from the past (and some who are quite problematic, but more on that next week). “Icon,” to me, is a curious word choice. We use it colloquially to describe media “icons” like Ellen Degeneres or George Takei. We also sometimes talk about “icons” of literature, like Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, or everybody’s favorite flamboyant Victorian, Oscar Wilde.

Where I’m coming from as a researcher of Early Modern Catholicism, however, “icon” carries a lot more political weight. Intended as representations of holiness, artistic icons of saints offered their venerators a means of more immediate connection with someone from Christian history with whom they could identify. Icons were also instrumental for educating the masses about their faith heritage. These were especially important qualities of Early Modern iconography for English Catholics during the Reformation, when the dominant ideology was bent on either converting or persecuting all the Catholics out of England — literally destroying their icons in the process. Icons thus also served as a cause around which the community rallied.

We can see reflections of this kind of political iconology (so to speak) in the icons of LGBT history. Looking to figures in which one sees oneself, especially famous figures, is a way of seeking support in a hostile setting where one is “different” or unwelcome. A significant purpose of the “It Gets Better” project (conveyed through that modern iconographic medium, YouTube) has been to offer words of encouragement and affirmation to troubled LGBT youth from people just like them who have suffered for their sexuality but have finally arrived at a “better” place. Likewise, especially during times of persecution, to seek out icons of all orientations from the past and share them with others inside the community builds connections among individuals in the community, and between the community and its past.

A key goal of LGBT history month is thus recuperation — locating where heteronormativity has obscured queerness and bringing queer icons back into the light, to resist the status quo which delegitimizes gender and sexual minorities by declaring them modern “corruptions” with no historical precedent. Although visibility in recent decades has actually made things better for LGBT Americans, it’s still not better enough for many, perhaps especially (ironically) in religious communities.

Thus queer religious studies is a growing field with both academic and activist investment. Frederick Roden writes about the Catholic aesthetics of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, a Victorian couple who wrote together as Michael Field. Leslie Feinberg names Joan of Arc as one of hir transgender icons for preferring execution over suppressing her desire to wear men’s clothing.1 And many gay Christians will point to David and Jonathan from the Book of Samuel as models for the Christian same-sex married life. This is the process of identification with historical figures that guides much of the everyday practice of LGBT history. David Halperin, who literally wrote the book on How to Do the History of Homosexuality, describes the process by saying, “Identification gets at something, something important: it picks out resemblances, connections, echo effects. Identification is a form of cognition,” requiring “the ability to set aside historical differences in order to focus on historical continuities.”2

Would Michael Field have described themselves as homosexual? Possibly—the word was coming into use towards the end of their career. Would Joan of Arc have considered herself to be trans*? Not likely, at least not in fifteenth-century France—she had different words for describing why it was her God-given prerogative to dress like a man. Were David and Jonathan the original same-sex couple? In a way, maybe, but that’s not really the point. What is important is the possibility of recognizing the queer aspects of these figures and applying them to modern settings. Like Early Modern Catholics saw themselves in the icons of historical saints, we can bridge past and present to make one long LGBT history by seeing ourselves in these queer icons.

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”

October is a beautiful month. My favorite bike trail smells like toast, crumbly apple crisp becomes a perfect midterm snack, and the trees are a rainbow of fire. When I walk past the striated maple on my way from class, I secretly like to think that maybe this is why October is LGBT history month.

I know the real history of LGBT history month, of course. First observed in 1994, these thirty-one days of celebration, reflection, and activism grew out of National Coming Out Day, which takes place every year on October 11. October 11 is itself the anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. LGBT history month itself, then, has an illustrious history.

Appropriately, one of the demands of the later 1993 March on Washington was for LGBT visibility in school curricula — a sort of collective “coming out” for LGBT history. To this end, a Missouri teacher named Rodney Wilson conceived of LGBT history month as a way to learn about gay and lesbian figures from our recent and distant past. Since then, schools and communities have expanded the scope of the month to include more gender and sexual minorities and more events like lectures, talent shows, and safer-spaces workshops. At its core, however, LGBT history month remains invested in its name: recovering and creating a history authored by and for sexual minorities.

In many ways, this is still important work for our present. In even recent history, sexual minorities had to live off the radar of mainstream, heteronormative society. This resulted in an occlusion of the rich history of sexual nonconformity, which its detractors took advantage of. As queer-studies scholar Elizabeth Freeman describes it, “since sexual identity emerged as a concept, gays and lesbians have been figured as having no past: no childhood, no origin or precedent in nature, no family traditions or legends, and, crucially, no history as a distinct people.”1 Erasure has been one of the key weapons that dominating forces has historically wielded against minorities of all kinds. This is one reason why the incorporation of LGBT history into school curricula remains controversial. Thus, rediscovering LGBT history — filling in the blanks that heteronormativity has generated by writing sexual minorities out of the general history — is an act of resistance and a reassertion of value.

But there is reason for skepticism about LGBT history from within the queer community, too. The idea that we can have an LGBT “history,” in which we can trace queer “ancestors,” buys into a heteronormative concept of time — that is, linear, reproductive time. There is also the problem of identifying figures from centuries past as “gay” or “lesbian”: not only does doing so efface one’s right to self-determination and self-identification, but it also erases the variety of erotic desires that exist outside the LGBT acronym — modes of desire which pre-date the concept of homosexuality, and sexual identity itself.

Over the next few weeks, I will look at how we “do” LGBT and queer histories (and what’s the difference) from a literary perspective: in particular, what it means to (re)construct a queer history, and the advantages and pitfalls of identifying queer figures in literary history. My examples will come especially from English literary history, since that is where my doctoral research is focused, but I hope that this discussion will illuminate conversations in other literary and non-literary fields. I’ll also consider the ways in which we can locate queer histories within the past while remaining responsible to individual actors in that history.

By way of analogy, I know that my reading of LGBT history in the trees on campus is factually incorrect, not unlike calling Shakespeare’s rival Christopher Marlowe “gay” is factually incorrect — if only because to Marlowe “gay” described color, dress, joy, pleasure, and not homosexuality. But I wonder if there’s something in the seemingly queer aesthetic of certain literary texts — like my rainbow trees — that can help us appreciate the beautiful depths of LGBT history.

Ashley O’Mara is a first-year PhD student and University Fellow in the English department. She studies Ignatian imagination and representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern poetry. In her free time, she writes creative nonfiction and reads BBC Sherlock fanfic “for research.”